scholarly journals Is There a Foreign Accent Effect on Moral Judgment?

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (12) ◽  
pp. 1631
Author(s):  
Alice Foucart ◽  
Susanne Brouwer
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Language ◽  
Cognitive Load ◽  
Native Speaker ◽  
Moral Dilemma ◽  
Psychological Distance ◽  
Moral Dilemmas ◽  
Moral Judgments ◽  
Foreign Accent ◽  
British English ◽  
Accented Speech

Recent studies have shown that people make more utilitarian decisions when dealing with a moral dilemma in a foreign language than in their native language. Emotion, cognitive load, and psychological distance have been put forward as explanations for this foreign language effect. The question that arises is whether a similar effect would be observed when processing a dilemma in one’s own language but spoken by a foreign-accented speaker. Indeed, foreign-accented speech has been shown to modulate emotion processing, to disrupt processing fluency and to increase psychological distance due to social categorisation. We tested this hypothesis by presenting 435 participants with two moral dilemmas, the trolley dilemma and the footbridge dilemma online, either in a native accent or a foreign accent. In Experiment 1, 184 native Spanish speakers listened to the dilemmas in Spanish recorded by a native speaker, a British English or a Cameroonian native speaker. In Experiment 2, 251 Dutch native speakers listened to the dilemmas in Dutch in their native accent, in a British English, a Turkish, or in a French accent. Results showed an increase in utilitarian decisions for the Cameroonian- and French-accented speech compared to the Spanish or Dutch native accent, respectively. When collapsing all the speakers from the two experiments, a similar increase in the foreign accent condition compared with the native accent condition was observed. This study is the first demonstration of a foreign accent effect on moral judgements, and despite the variability in the effect across accents, the findings suggest that a foreign accent, like a foreign language, is a linguistic context that modulates (neuro)cognitive mechanisms, and consequently, impacts our behaviour. More research is needed to follow up on this exploratory study and to understand the influence of factors such as emotion reduction, cognitive load, psychological distance, and speaker’s idiosyncratic features on moral judgments.

scholarly journals When One Person's Mistake Is Another's Standard Usage: The Effect of Foreign Accent on Syntactic Processing

2012 ◽  
Vol 24 (4) ◽  
pp. 878-887 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adriana Hanulíková ◽  
Petra M. van Alphen ◽  
Merel M. van Goch ◽  
Andrea Weber
Keyword(s):  
Speech Processing ◽  
Native Speaker ◽  
Neural Correlates ◽  
Syntactic Processing ◽  
Foreign Accent ◽  
Gender Agreement ◽  
Accented Speech ◽  
Grammatical Errors ◽  
Integration Problem ◽  
Native Speech

How do native listeners process grammatical errors that are frequent in non-native speech? We investigated whether the neural correlates of syntactic processing are modulated by speaker identity. ERPs to gender agreement errors in sentences spoken by a native speaker were compared with the same errors spoken by a non-native speaker. In line with previous research, gender violations in native speech resulted in a P600 effect (larger P600 for violations in comparison with correct sentences), but when the same violations were produced by the non-native speaker with a foreign accent, no P600 effect was observed. Control sentences with semantic violations elicited comparable N400 effects for both the native and the non-native speaker, confirming no general integration problem in foreign-accented speech. The results demonstrate that the P600 is modulated by speaker identity, extending our knowledge about the role of speaker's characteristics on neural correlates of speech processing.

scholarly journals Adolescent Concepts of Responsibility in Different Types of Moral Dilemmas

2017 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 81-90 ◽  
Author(s):  
S.V. Molchanov ◽  
O.V. Almazova
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Analysis ◽  
Empirical Study ◽  
Moral Reasoning ◽  
Moral Dilemma ◽  
Moral Dilemmas ◽  
Moral Judgments ◽  
Main Character ◽  
Moral Norms ◽  
Different Types ◽  
The Relationship

The paper presents results of an empirical study of adolescents' concepts of responsibility in different types of moral dilemmas characterized by violations of moral norms. The study proved that the type of moral dilemma and the context of interaction of its participants determine the adolescents' readiness to recognize the responsibility of the main character of the dilemma for violating the norm. In dilemmas of asocial type adolescents are more willing to recognize the responsibility of the offender whose behavior leads to obvious damage for one of the participants in the interaction. As for prosocial dilemmas and dilemmas of confronting norms, adolescents tend to deny the responsibility of the offender. The paper provides a comparative analysis of empirically identified types of adolescent concepts of responsibility, including the differentiated responsibility with egoistic orientation, high responsibility, low responsibility and ‘polar’ responsibility. The authors highlight the ambiguity of the relationship between adolescents’ evaluation of behavior, their readiness to recognize responsibility in moral transgression, and their judgment about the necessity of punishment. The paper concludes with the discussion concerning the relationship between the level of development of moral judgments/moral reasoning and the concepts of responsibility in adolescents.

P01-248-Theory of mind, moral judgments and neuropsychological functioning in patients with bipolar disorders

2011 ◽  
Vol 26 (S2) ◽  
pp. 249-249
Author(s):  
M. Signorelli ◽  
A. Geraci ◽  
E. Aguglia
Keyword(s):  
Theory Of Mind ◽  
Cognitive Processes ◽  
Neuropsychological Functioning ◽  
Moral Dilemma ◽  
Bipolar Disorders ◽  
Moral Dilemmas ◽  
Moral Judgments ◽  
Multiple Correlation ◽  
Emotional Recognition ◽  
First Time

IntroductionSeveral studies revealed that cognitive functioning in BPD are impaired not only in the acute phase but over time (Mur et al., 2008). On Theory of Mind (ToM) recent studies found a impairment of this ability in remitted patients, supporting the theory that ToM deficits are trait-dependent (Bora et al., 2009) in contrast with another study that suggest a partially dependence(Wolf et al. 2010).ObjectivesWe explored: a) ToM in BPD investigating two cognitive processes: emotional recognition, second order beliefs attribution; b) Moral judgments in BPD; c) possible effects of neuropsychological functioning on ToM task and moral dilemmas.AimsThe principal aim is to investigate the domain specificity of ToM and Moral sense, studying selective impairments.MethodA total of 20 patients with bipolar I disorder were tested and 20 healthy controls. We use a complete neuropsychological assessment, two ToM tasks (Eyes test, Sullivan's stories) and we added two moral dilemmas to asses moral judgment Results: We found ToM deficits in BDP, with a multiple correlation between ToM and neuropsychological functioning. Also we found for the first time a impairment on personal moral dilemma, with a correlation between emotional recognition and moral judgments.ConclusionPatients with BPD are impaired in ToM partially independent of other cognitive dysfunctions and in moral reasoning.

Moral Judgment in Middle and Late Adulthood: The Effects of Age-Appropriate Moral Dilemmas and Spontaneous Role Taking

1986 ◽  
Vol 22 (3) ◽  
pp. 161-172 ◽  
Author(s):  
Janet Blum Chap
Keyword(s):  
Moral Judgment ◽  
Moral Dilemma ◽  
Moral Dilemmas ◽  
Cross Sectional Study ◽  
Moral Judgments ◽  
Age Difference ◽  
Cross Sectional ◽  
Younger Adults ◽  
Role Taking ◽  
Age Appropriate

This was a cross-sectional study of the effects of age, sex, and moral dilemma content on adult moral reasoning. Hypothetical dilemmas were presented to sixty men and women, thirty of whom were elderly and thirty in early middle age. With education controlled there were no age or sex differences in moral maturity. Dilemma content had a significant effect on moral judgment, with a tendency for each age group to use a higher level of judgment when the situation described was age-appropriate, i.e., relevant to that group's stage of life. There was a significant age difference on a measure of spontaneous role taking: old persons made more definitive moral judgments than the younger adults, who attempted to reconcile the various points of view represented in a dilemma.

scholarly journals Native Speaker Perceptions of Accented Speech: The English Pronunciation of Macedonian EFL Learners

2010 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
pp. 41-61 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anastazija Kirkova-Naskova
Keyword(s):  
Web Application ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
Native Speaker ◽  
Foreign Accent ◽  
Point Scale ◽  
Efl Learners ◽  
Accented Speech ◽  
English Pronunciation ◽  
Native Speakers Of English ◽  
Result Analysis

The paper reports on the results of a study that aimed to describe the vocalic and consonantal features of the English pronunciation of Macedonian EFL learners as perceived by native speakers of English and to find out whether native speakers who speak different standard variants of English perceive the same segments as non-native. A specially designed computer web application was employed to gather two types of data: a) quantitative (frequency of segment variables and global foreign accent ratings on a 5-point scale), and b) qualitative (open-ended questions). The result analysis points out to three most frequent markers of foreign accent in the English speech of Macedonian EFL learners: final obstruent devoicing, vowel shortening and substitution of English dental fricatives with Macedonian dental plosives. It also reflects additional phonetic aspects poorly explained in the available reference literature such as allophonic distributional differences between the two languages and intonational mismatch.

scholarly journals Does foreign language alter moral judgments? No evidence from two pre-registered studies with the CNI-model

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lena Nadarevic ◽  
Lena Klein ◽  
Janna Dierolf
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Language ◽  
Native Language ◽  
Moral Dilemmas ◽  
Moral Judgments ◽  
Multinomial Model ◽  
Language Effects ◽  
General Preference ◽  
Underlying Mechanisms ◽  
Context Specific

Recent studies suggest that processing moral dilemmas in a foreign language instead of the native language increases the likelihood of moral judgments in line with the utilitarian principle. The goal of our research was to investigate the replicability and robustness of this moral foreign-language effect and to explore its underlying mechanisms by means of the CNI model—a multinomial model that allows to estimate the extent to which moral judgments are driven by people’s sensitivity to consequences (C-parameter), their sensitivity to norms (N-parameter), and their general preference for action or inaction (I-parameter). In two pre-registered studies, German participants provided moral judgments to dilemmas that were either presented in German or English. In Experiment 1, participants judged eight different dilemmas in four versions each (i.e., 32 dilemmas in total). In Experiment 2, participants judged four different dilemmas in one of the four versions (i.e., 4 dilemmas in total). Neither of the two studies replicated the moral foreign-language effect. Moreover, we also did not find reliable language effects on the three parameters of the CNI-model. We conclude that if there is a moral foreign-language effect, it must be very fragile and context specific.

scholarly journals The perception of native vs. non-native Danish speech: Bent and Bradlow’s matched interlanguage speech intelligibility benefit revisited

2020 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 284-296
Author(s):  
Paweł Korpal ◽  
◽  
Mikołaj Sobkowiak ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Speech Intelligibility ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
Native Speaker ◽  
Foreign Accent ◽  
Valuable Insight ◽  
Accented Speech ◽  
Polish Language ◽  
Native Speech ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
Language Pair

The main objective of the study was to test the applicability of Bent and Bradlow’s matched interlanguage speech intelligibility benefit to the Danish-Polish language pair. We aimed to verify whether it was easier for Polish students of Danish to understand a Danish native speaker or a Polish speaker with a proficient command of Danish. Sixteen Polish students, divided into two groups of eight, listened to two recordings of two Danish texts: one recorded by a native speaker of Danish and the other one — by a native speaker of Polish who is a graduate of Danish philology from a Polish university. Before the experiment, all of the recordings were evaluated in terms of traces of foreign accent using a 7-point Likert scale, the experts being native speakers of Danish. The evaluators assessed the Polish native speaker’s pronunciation as proficient, but they identified certain segmental and suprasegmental features in his speech that are common indicators of a foreign accent in Danish. During the experiment, participants were asked to fill in each recording transcript with twenty missing words. The analysis of the results revealed that the participants scored higher when listening to the text recorded by the Polish speaker. Hence, the matched interlanguage speech intelligibility benefit was observed in a study using Polish as L1 (native language) and Danish as a foreign language. The study may provide a valuable insight into the question of non-native speech perception, foreign-accented speech and the veracity of the matched interlanguage speech intelligibility benefit for the Polish–Danish language pair.

scholarly journals Moral thinking across the world: Exploring the influence of personal force and intention in moral dilemma judgments

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bence Bago ◽  
Balazs Aczel ◽  
Zoltan Kekecs ◽  
John Protzko ◽  
Marton Kovacs ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Moral Judgment ◽  
Moral Dilemma ◽  
Moral Dilemmas ◽  
Situational Factors ◽  
Moral Judgments ◽  
Physical Contact ◽  
Moral Decisions ◽  
Large N ◽  
The World ◽  
The Impact

Much research on moral judgment is centered on moral dilemmas in which deontological perspectives (i.e., emphasizing rules, individual rights and duties) are in conflict with utilitarian judgements (i.e., following the greater good defined through consequences). A central finding of this field Greene et al. showed that psychological and situational factors (e.g., the intent of the agent, or physical contact between the agent and the victim) play an important role in people’s use of deontological versus utilitarian considerations when making moral decisions. As their study was conducted with US samples, our knowledge is limited concerning the universality of this effect, in general, and the impact of culture on the situational and psychological factors of moral judgments, in particular. Here, we empirically test the universality of deontological and utilitarian judgments by replicating Greene et al.’s experiments on a large (N = X,XXX) and diverse (WEIRD and non-WEIRD) sample across the world to explore the influence of culture on moral judgment. The relevance of this exploration to a broad range of policy-making problems is discussed.

scholarly journals The effects of alcohol on heart rate and evaluation of actions in moral dilemma

2017 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-22 ◽  
Author(s):  
K.R. Arutyunova ◽  
A.V. Bakhchina ◽  
A.K. Krylov ◽  
Yu.I. Alexandrov
Keyword(s):  
Heart Rate ◽  
Social Behaviour ◽  
Moral Dilemma ◽  
Alcoholic Beverage ◽  
Research Programme ◽  
Moral Dilemmas ◽  
Moral Judgments ◽  
Time Interval ◽  
Alcohol Condition ◽  
Time Required

Despite a great progress in our understanding of alcohol influence on physiological processes and brain function, the mechanisms of alcohol effects on human social behaviour are still unclear. This work is focused on studying whether and how alcohol (ethanol, 1 g/kg) may affect evaluation of moral permissibility of harmful actions and the dynamics of heart rate characteristics during solving moral dilemmas. Subjects (n=40) were tested twice with the time interval of 2-4 months: once they assessed protagonists’ actions in moral dilemmas after drinking an alcoholic beverage and once – after drinking a non-alcoholic beverage (counterbalanced). The results showed that moral judgements did not always change under alcohol influence but when they did, responses shifted in different directions: some individuals began to judge harmful actions as less permissible while others began to judge them as more permissible. A negative correlation was shown between heart rate and time required for solving moral dilemmas in alcohol condition. Alcohol decreased heart rate variability, including a measure of complexity (ApEn). These results are in line with the view that alcohol intake causes a decrease in complexity of behaviour and its system organisation which may represent the general psychophysiological mechanism underlying various effects of alcohol on social behaviour. This work was supported by the Russian Foundation for Humanities (project № 14-06-00680, «Formation of moral judgments as a mechanism of human adaptation for social and cultural environment in norm and under alcohol intoxica- tion») and was performed as part of a research programme of one of the leading scientific schools of Russian Federation «System Psychophysiology» (НШ-9808.2016.6).

scholarly journals Using the CNI Model to Investigate Individual Differences in Moral Dilemma Judgments

2020 ◽  
Vol 46 (9) ◽  
pp. 1392-1407 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anita Körner ◽  
Roland Deutsch ◽  
Bertram Gawronski
Keyword(s):  
Individual Differences ◽  
Individual Difference ◽  
Behavioral Activation ◽  
Moral Identity ◽  
Moral Dilemma ◽  
Need For Cognition ◽  
Moral Dilemmas ◽  
Moral Judgments ◽  
Moral Norms ◽  
General Preference

Typical moral dilemmas pitting the consequences of a given action against the action’s consistency with moral norms confound several determinants of moral judgments. Dissociating these determinants, the CNI model allows researchers to quantify sensitivity to consequences, sensitivity to norms, and general preference for inaction over action regardless of consequences and norms. However, with the currently available set of dilemmas for research using the CNI model, the model is not suitable for studies with individual-difference designs. To overcome this limitation, the current research investigated the suitability of an extended dilemma battery to make the CNI model amenable for individual-difference research, examining relations of its parameters with psychopathy, empathic concern, need for cognition, self-reported utilitarianism, behavioral activation/inhibition, moral identity, and religiosity. The results support the suitability of the CNI model for individual-difference research with the extended dilemma battery, providing more nuanced insights into the underpinnings of individual differences in moral dilemma judgments.

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